世論 What Japan Thinks

Well, it’s not really a competition of one against the other, but instead a cross-reference of awareness of Sudoku amongst console and computer gamers. japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into sudoku.

Demographics

On the 26th of October 2007 331 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor group employed in either the public or private sector completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 81.0% of the sample was male, 14.2% in their twenties, 37.8% in their thirties, 34.4% in their forties, 12.1% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.

This survey doesn’t use sudoko, however, as the primary name for the puzzle; that seems to be ナンプレ, nanpure, an abbreviation of number place, or so my dictionary tells me.

If you want to get hold of some sudoku puzzles, one cheap way in Japan is to go to Daiso, the big 100 yen chain store, and pick up one or more of the eight volumes they have on sale, each with over 100 puzzles inside. The books also have below the puzzles small bits of trivia; one of my volumes has proverbs, the other four-character kanji phrases.

Oh, and today I received a prize after doing the Sudoku in my wife’s newspaper - it was just a boring old eco bag, however.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with Cross Marketing Inc performed a survey on next-generation game consoles. They interviewed 366 self-confessed gamers; 50.3% were male, 25.4% in their teens (18 or 19 to be exact), 24.9% in their twenties, 24.6% in their thirties, and 25.1% in their forties.

With the recent name change of the next Nintendo to Wii (I try to think of the name as referring to going “whee!”, not going wee…) the awareness of the name seems rather low; it would have been interesting to have used the previous Revolution codename instead in this survey. I will keep an eye open to see if the awareness of Wii increases in the coming months.
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With the XBox 360 release date now announced, and the new Revolution controller previewed (and I must say it looks interesting!) more research shows the PS3 still the top must buy for people. It will be interesting to see if the Revolution moves up on the back of its showing at the Tokyo Game Show.
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Last month there was a survey on what users are doing with their PSPs. Once again, this is a report about a survey, so fuzzy numbers abound! The basic data - PSP users own an average of 3.1 titles (does this include bundled titles?), but only a tenth of the users own any UMD video disks, and round about a fifth have used the browser. 1000 users or people with family machines were surveyed in early August of this year.

Q: When did you buy your PSP?

Launch day! 2004/12/12	c. 10%
From 2004/12/13 to 2004/12/31	c. 35%
2005/1/1 to 2005/2/28	c. 30%
2005/3/1 to 2005/5/31	c. 25%
From 2005/6/1	Just over 10%

The largest collection of game software titles was 50 for males, 20 for females.

Regarding UMD video titles, 13.5% of males and 12.9% of females owned at least one. Over half those interviewed, male and female, owned no videos and had no plans to buy UMD any titles. However, for those who were interested in UMD video, movies were the most popular type of content, and over half planned to either buy or rent the forthcoming “Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children” CG movie.

Almost half the males, and almost a third of the females had bought Memory Stick Duos, but almost half of these owners hadn’t used the memory cards recently. Regarding the v2.0 firmware update that added the internet browser, released on July 27th, about a quarter of the males and just over a tenth of the females had upgraded. Half the women did not know the upgrade was being distributed, and (a different, I guess?) 30% had no plans to upgrade, mostly as they didn’t really use the PSP for anything other than games.

In addition to the PSP, 90% also had a PS2 at home, a little over 60% had a PS or PSone, just under half had a GameBoy Advance, and 35% a Nintendo DS.

Ahh, the power of the Sony brand!

Finally a short survey! Asking people who already had a games console at home which one of the new XBOX360, PS3 or Nintendo Revolution they wanted, the following results came out. Unfortunately, as this is only a report about a survey, the figures are a bit rough.
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